1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to consumer processing and transaction systems and, in particular, to a consumer processing system and method for identifying and recognizing a consumer or customer engaged in a transaction with a merchant, such as the identification and recognition of a repeat customer at a particular point-of-sale.
2. Description of Related Art
In order to enable convenient purchases or goods and services by consumers, the financial service industry has developed many alternative payment methods that allow a consumer to engage in a transaction and receive goods and services on credit. For example, such alternative payment methods may include checks, ATM or debit cards, credit cards, charge cards, etc. In addition, these credit vehicles are able to be used on many platforms and via many communication methods and processes. For example, a credit or charge card may be used over the telephone, by mail or electronically over the Internet or at an in-store location. The benefit of existing payment methods allows a consumer to move the point-of-sale (POS) from an in-store location to one's home. For example, a consumer may place an order from a catalog over the telephone and use a credit card or a charge card to pay for the goods and/or services. A similar process can be used for mail orders.
Virtual commerce and the growth of the Internet as a medium for commerce have placed pressure on the payment options discussed above with respect to both convenience, transactional security and profitability by the credit issuer. However, the consumer's convenience is paramount, and the Internet provides yet another POS, or option, to the consumer for purchasing goods and/or services via an alternative medium. This growth in commerce on the Internet and over the telephone has also placed additional burdens on the merchant, such as identification and recognition of a customer. However, this burden also may lead to certain benefits, such as the ability to identify and recognize customers in not only a negative sense, such as in the identification of fraud or bad credit, but also in a positive sense, such as in the opportunity to offer additional benefit to a repeat customer in good standing.
Moving the POS to the consumer's home, the consumer can use the telephone or otherwise conduct business over the Internet, which provides a tangible benefit to the consumer. Such remote transactions provide the consumer with a certain amount of anonymity, as well as a much greater amount of convenience in making purchases. Likewise, the merchant obtains more business by opening up these lines of communication and allowing for the engagement in such a transaction at remote points-of-sale.
However, both the consumers and the merchants suffer in one important respect. In particular, when operating in a real-time sales environment, the merchant typically has no way of quickly determining whether a consumer is a repeat customer. Accordingly, the merchant may suffer by offering goods and services to a person with a fraudulent history or bad credit characteristics, based upon these previous sales. Such activity is detrimental to the merchant, and could have been avoided had the merchant been able to identify and recognize this repeat consumer. Similarly, both the merchant and consumer may suffer from this lack of identification and recognition on the “positive” side of a previous transaction. For example, a repeat and “good” customer may be offered additional benefits or special merchant offers, which will further engender the consumer to the merchant and provide the merchant with additional business. However, since such repeat consumers cannot be identified or recognized in many cases, the ability to provide such a benefit to the consumer, which indirectly also benefits the merchant, is unavailable.
Therefore, it is the merchant's ability to identify and recognize a consumer using various data transmitted to the merchant that allows for this mutually beneficial and ongoing consumer/merchant relationship. Of course, as discussed above, this relationship may be a potential “negative” relationship (such as in bad credit) or a “positive” relationship (such as in offering “perks” to the best customers). In either case, the merchant must have access to this valuable information and data in order to decide how best to interact with any individual consumer.
According to the prior art, existing merchants have used various approaches in order to overcome the inability to quickly identify repeat customers, such as quickly identifying repeat customers in a real-time sales environment. For example, some merchants attempt to solve this problem by requiring a log-in by the customer prior to purchase. Many times, this approach causes abandonment of shopping carts and reduces the total sales that a merchant will close. Therefore, this log-in process reduces the merchant's aggregate revenue and profit. Other merchants invest in software, purchased externally or internally developed, as well as hardware, to run real-time applications that use various methods to identify existing customers. However, such an approach raises a merchant's capital expenditure and operating costs. Still further, some merchants do neither the log-in process nor invest in any software, and forego the business benefit of knowing who was a repeat customer in real-time. These merchants usually run a monthly or weekly batch process to identify the repeat customers, but this process does not allow them any real-time benefit.